Philosophy of Mind: Imagination

This article traces the radical devaluation of the phantasm throughout Western civilization. With the help of Nietzsche's critical perspective, I develop a notion of hystery as the series of collective traumas repeated in each individual's growth, whereby the phantasm changes value from psychosomatic interface, to evil incarnate, to disease of learning. Beginning with the Classical episteme represented by Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, then moving up through the Christian era, I focus primarily on Enlightenment thinkers such as Hobbes and Bacon, who represent the last nail in the imagination's coffin. The next section examines Nietzsche's rediscovery of the phantasm and the theoretical contributions of post-structuralism that follow in Nietzsche's wake. Juxtaposing Bataille and Deleuze, I look at Deleuze's early enthusiasm and ultimate betrayal of the phantasm, and I posit Bataille's emphasis on the affective force of the mythological phantasm as an insurrection to reclaim our experience and life along with it. The article ends with speculation, offering Bruno's art of memory as an ontic and epistemic alternative to dominant Western hystery, other pasts opening to other possible futures, an ungrounding that paradoxically leads to a restoration of the human house in a re-enchanted cosmos.

This paper unites current philosophical thinking on imagination with a burgeoning debate in the philosophy of memory over whether episodic remembering is simply a kind of imagining. So far, this debate has been hampered by a lack of clarity in the notion of 'imagining' at issue. Several options are considered and constructive imagining is identified as the relevant kind. Next, a functionalist account of episodic memory is defended as a means to establishing two key points: first, one need not defend a factive (or "causalist") view of remembering in order to hold that causal connections to past experiences are essential to how rememberings are typed; and, second, current theories that equate remembering with imagining are in fact consistent with a functionalist theory that includes causal connections in its account of what it is to remember. This suggests that remembering is not a kind of imagining and clarifies what it would take to establish the contrary.

“This is an extremely bold attempt to investigate the cultural history of imagination in a European context and to analyse the cultural enactment of imagination in dramatic texts as potential performance. As a concept imagination is more often assumed than actually investigated or historicised, both which  this study very definitely does.” (Christopher Balme, Chair of Theatre Studies at LMU Munich, Germany)

This book is the first comprehensive analysis of the fascinating and strikingly diverse history of imagination in the context of theatre and drama. Key questions that the book explores are: How do spectators engage with the drama in performance, and how does the historical context influence the dramaturgy of imagination? In addition to offering a study of the cultural history and theory of imagination in a European context including its philosophical, physiological, cultural and political implications, the book examines the cultural enactment of imagination in the drama text and offers practical strategies for analyzing the aesthetic practice of imagination in drama texts. It covers the early modern to the late modernist period and includes three in-depth case studies: William Shakespeare’s Macbeth (c.1606); Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879); and Eugène Ionesco’s The Killer (1957).

In the thought of Plotinus, the imagination is responsible for the apprehension of the activity of Intellect. If creativity in the arts involves an exercise of the imagination, the image-making power that links sense perception to noetic thought and the nous poietikos, the poetic or creative intellect, then the arts exercise the apprehension of intellectual activity. According to John Dillon in “Plotinus and the Transcendental Imagination,” Plotinus’ conception of the imagination led to the formulation of the imagination as a basis of artistic creativity. In Plotinus, imagination operates on several different levels: it produces images in sense perception, it synthesizes images in dianoetic thought, and it produces images in correspondence with the articulation through logos of noetic thought. The imagination is what connects the intelligible in intellect and the form in sense perception. Plotinus imagines an art which is a product of noetic thought as made possible by the imagination. The primary principle of beauty is Intellect, from which all images should be taken, as facilitated by imagination. Forms of art, like the forms of nature, are the product of Intellect. The production of a work of art is an intellectual or spiritual exercise of the imagination that allows apprehension of Intellect and noesis in nous poietikos. All art is metaphysical, and is an expression of intelligible form in imagination, an expression of an intellectual idea that can be differentiated from sensible form in intellectual apprehension. There are many ways in which the tenets of the thought of Plotinus become currents of art and aesthetic theory as it develops to the present day.

The subject of free will has suffered something of a renascence in recent popularized American philosophy. The issue is, of course, a Gordian knot of underlying metaphysical and ontological presupposition, in both the analytic and continental traditions. In this paper, I attempt a bit of an untangling, and in doing so, I find that the fundamental position of the contemporary champion of “no freedom” (Galen Strawson) is not only compatible with a radical Sartrean freedom, but that the two philosophers’ deeper ontology is much the same, supports the same metaphysics and the same outline of an existentialist ethics. My approach is a combination of analytic and continental method and background: I continue to believe that there is no necessary separation between the analytic and continental camps, and that there is much to be gained from the reabsorption of analytic style into the broader philosophic tradition.


KEYWORDS: Free will, agency, cause, objective attitude, value, consciousness

This forthcoming paper (July 2016) will explore the many psychological “uses” of film by a society – including by psychotherapists.

Wilfred Bion's concept of alpha function - which he sometimes called "Narrative Alpha" (see, for example, his Cogitations) plays an important role in the development of cognitive-emotional imagination.

The paper concludes that, these days, cinema is the closest we have to large group dreaming – where we, as a society, make some vital contact with our unconscious life of mind.

[AMAZON LINK BELOW TO BOOK ITSELF -- TOC and book intro in downloadable .pdf] 

"It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it." --John Steinbeck Scientific research confirms what people have always known: answers, ideas, and inspiration do come to us in dreams. Harvard psychologist and world-renowned dream specialist Deirdre Barrett, Ph.D., offers this rich collection of examples of how the world's most creative practitioners in art, music, film, science, literature and other fields have used the revelations of their dream life to inform their work. Dr. Barrett offers insights showing us how to encourage lucid, meaningful dreaming, and how to apply the meanings of our dreams to solving problems--from the everyday to the extraordinary. This is the stuff dreams are made of. In the visual arts, Jasper Johns couldn't find his unique artistic vision until he dreamed it in the form of a large American flag. Salvador Dali and his colleagues built the startling new genre of surrealism out of dreams. Kubla Kahn dreamed the design for his stately pleasure dome; thousands of years later, Lucy Davis, chief architect at a major firm, continues the tradition of dreaming designs into life in her extraordinary buildings. Film is a fertile avenue for dreams: "Twice I have transferred dreams to film exactly as I had dreamed them," confides director Ingmar Bergman, as have Federico Fellini, Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Robert Altman, and John Sayles. From Mary Shelley's terrible nightmare, which became Frankenstein, to Stephen King's haunting dream as a little boy, which led to his first bestseller, countless writers have consulted the Committee. Musicians from Beethoven to Billy Joel and Paul McCartney have whistled the Committee's tunes. In science, physiologist Otto Loewi dreamed the medical experiment that earned him the Nobel Prize. In sports, Marion Jones dreamed she'd broken a world record, then brought the dream to life. Gandhi translated his dream of resistance into a movement that changed the world. Since Freud, we take it for granted that our dreams reflect our past. In The Committee of Sleep, Barrett reveals how dreams can also tell us about our future potential--and how to reach it.

Immaginazione: clava della memoria. Il valore dell'immaginazione nel pensiero e nella proposta di Luigi Giussani Imagination: key of the memory. The value of imagination in the thought and the proposal of Luigi Giussani Riassunto Il presente saggio tenta una preliminare messa a fuoco del ruolo che gioca l'imma-ginazione nel pensiero di Luigi Giussani. Nonostante non si trovi una teorizzazione e trattazione unitaria e conclusiva della facoltà immaginativa nelle pagine del nostro Autore, la messa a tema del dinamismo immaginativo emerge a più riprese nella sua opera quale aspetto non secondario. Riteniamo, inoltre, che la comprensione del ruo-lo dell'immaginazione nella proposta di Giussani costituisca un punto privilegiato di osservazione in ordine a cogliere l'originalità del suo pensiero. Nell'ampia e diversi-ficata tipologia di testi e di contributi del teologo milanese emerge innanzitutto una comprensione dell'immaginazione in relazione al naturale dinamismo della ragione e, soprattutto, una precisa comprensione della stessa alla luce del dirsi e darsi di Cristo nella storia. L'evento rivelativo del comunicarsi di Cristo riconfigurerebbe, segnan-dola irreversibilmente, l'immaginazione stessa: introdotta oltre se stessa, nell'inimma-ginabile, questa immaginazione "dilatata" contribuirebbe ad un vero e proprio "al-largamento" della stessa razionalità. In questa «moltiplicazione dell'immaginazione», per dirla con Giussani, si schiude il nesso immaginazione-memoria al punto da po-terne parlare nei termini di «clava della memoria»: immaginazione "salvata" dall'in-contro con Cristo. Il lavoro si struttura partendo da un inquadramento, secondo il pensiero di Giussani, dell'Immaginazione nell'uomo (1), sottolineando L'immagina-zione: dinamismo naturale della ragione (1.1) e L'inevitabile ripiegamento dell'imma-ginazione (1.2). La seconda parte tematizza L'immaginazione salvata dalla rivelazione (2), nei termini dell'antica e della nuova alleanza: Dio si fa incontro all'immaginazione dell'uomo: Israele (2.1) e Un amore comprensivo oltre ogni umana immaginazione: il Verbo si è fatto carne (2.2). La terza e ultima parte Conclusioni e aperture (3) approda ad una sintesi secondo un'espressione dello stesso Giussani, Immaginazione «clava del guerriero che è la memoria» (3.1), per poi sottolineare come L'inimmaginabile continua ad accadere in un «incontro» possibile: la Chiesa (3.2) e concludersi, infine, in alcune Aperture e prospettive (3.3).


Abstract
This essay attempts a preliminary focusing on the role that imagination plays in Gius- sani’s thought. Despite the fact that we can’t find a theoretical and conclusive exposi- tion about this topic in the pages of our Author, we have to admit that the theme of imaginative dynamism is thematized in his pages many times. We also believe that the comprehension of the role of imagination in Giussanis’ aim could be a privileged point of view in order to identify the originality of his same thought. In his textual production, first of all, emerges a natural comprehension of imagination in order to natural reason’s dynamism but, more important, there is revealed a clear comprehen- sion of imagination in the light of Christ’s event in the history. The entrance of God in time would be a reconfiguration of the imagination itself: marked in an irrevers- ible way by this event, this “broadened” imagination would contribute to a specular real “enlargement” of the same rationality. In this «multiplication of imagination», as Giussani says, it is revealed the deep relationship between imagination and memory, understood as memory of Christ, a relation which enables our Author to define im- agination as “memory’s club”: a “saved” imagination, saved by the encounter with Christ. The work is structured starting from a reconnaissance, according to Gius- sani’s thought, of Imagination in man (1), emphasizing the rule of Imagination: natu- ral dynamism of reason (1.1) and The inevitable folding of the imagination (1.2). The second part deals with Imagination saved by revelation (2), in terms of the old and the new covenant: God meets man’s imagination: Israel (2.1) and A comprehensive love beyond all human imagination: the Word became flesh (2.2). The third and final part – Conclusions and openings (3) – leads to a synthesis according to an expression of Giussani himself, Imagination “club of the warrior who is memory” (3.1), to then underline how The Unimaginable continues to happen in a possible “encounter”: the Church (3.2) and finally ending in some Openings and perspectives (3.3).

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One of the most renowned pages of Pascal's Pensées offers an astonishing phenomenology of the all-powerful action of imagination in human life. This article retraces the genesis of this text and reassesses the sources of Pascal's conception of imagination. It argues that Pascal builds up his definition of the imagination as an ‘anti-theodicy’ which carefully recalls and then criticizes the Cartesian ‘theodicy of error’ and the foundation of the ‘general rule’ of truth proposed by the Fourth Meditation. In doing so, Pascal undermines the major aim of Descartes's Meditations, which is to secure human nature against any doubt as to its intrinsic perfection. Where, according to Descartes, human knowledge is finite yet perfectly secured in its accomplishments when we use the faculties of our mind correctly, Pascal describes imagination as a deceptive faculty that seems to have been given to us specifically to lead us into necessary error.

In this essay, I argue that a proper understanding of the Cartesian proof of the external world sheds light on some vexatious questions concerning his theory of sense perception. Three main points emerge from the discussion: a picture of the mind, conceived as the power of understanding, as essentially related to the physical world; an extension of rationality such that it includes a set of necessities that neither can be deduced from the principles furnished by pure understanding alone nor are to be found among the particular items of sense experience; and a conception of human sense perception as a composite power that includes sensory awareness as well as understanding, and so that establishes a sharp distinction between human and animal sensory awareness. As far as agency is a constitutive ingredient of human sense perception, Descartes’ doctrine is in line with some current versions of a virtue epistemology.

Two recent novels, Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, are philosophically instructive. These books are interesting, I argue, because they reveal something about understanding and appreciating narrative.  They show us that audience’s participation in narrative is much more subtle and complex than philosophers generally acknowledge.  An analysis of these books reveals that narrative imagining is not static or unified, but dynamic and multipolar.  I argue that once the complexity of narrative engagement is better understood, some prominent philosophical problems and debates concerning narrative dissolve.

This fascinating book by Bruno Bettelheim investigates the psychology and cultural benefits of fairy tales on developing minds, and by extension into adulthood and more mature thinking.  The author demonstrates the importance of these folk narratives within any civilisation and its advancement by analysing various versions of popular fairy tales.

http://www.whenthenewsstops.org/2016/10/the-uses-of-enchantment-meaning.html

My theme is ‘life-writing’, understood as the shaping of one's life through the contemplation of values, although this activity is mostly unreflective. To become an art so that one's life can be shaped in greater accord with clearly held values, this process must become reflective. These values have an inescapably ethical dimension, because as we necessarily poetize our surrounding world, we contribute to our personal and communal ethos the character that arises from the culturally shaping power of guiding ideals. Even the immoralist cultivates life within an ethos where obscure feelings connect with some thing or other, whereby certain aims will then appear more valuable than others.

To understand how we cannot help but shape our lives according to dimly or clearly intuited values, I compare Coleridge’s primary imagination, the ‘shaping spirit’ ‘necessary for all human perception’ with Kant’s ‘blind though indispensible function of the soul, without which we would have no cognition at all, yet of which we are scarcely ever conscious’. With Coleridge, we find in imagination an impulse to connect profound but obscure presentiments and ideas with our surroundings. This impulse propels great art and everyday aesthetics alike. Whether we pursue merely what attracts us, or seek value beyond this, all lives are freely shaped, without excuses, as the existentialists say, but not always in the most pellucid consciousness. Our choices inevitably engage us in the poetic art of life-writing. Cast in medias res, we necessarily improvise. But this is no argument against lives being moral-aesthetic works, spontaneous compositions in value.

For most people visual mental imagery is a common, frequent experience (Galton, 1880; Betts, 1909; Doob, 1972; Marks, 1999; Thomas, 2010 §1). We often recall past events, or imagine possible ones, by forming mental images. Our dreams may also consist largely of mental imagery. Indeed, many philosophers and psychologists have held that, together with immediate perceptual experience, imagery makes up the entirety of consciousness (although clearly not just visual imagery, but also imagery in other sense modes, especially inner speech, auditory or vocal-motor imagery of spoken words). If we are to fully understand consciousness, we will certainly need to understand mental imagery. In this article, current theories of mental imagery are described and evaluated in the light of the fact that imagery is consciously experienced (a fact that is, remarkably, largely neglected in most discussions of the topic).

Philosophers have studied mental imagery for many centuries, experimental psychologists have studied it for well over a hundred years, and more recently it has attracted the attention of cognitive scientists and neuroscientists, but many basic questions still remain unresolved (Thomas, 2010). There is controversy not only over what cognitive and neural mechanisms are responsible for imagery, but also over its function (if any) in cognition. Some regard mental imagery (or some closely related notion, such as "perceptual symbols" or "image schemata") to be the necessary vehicle for all thought[1]; some regard it as important only for certain types of cognitive task (such as judging spatial relationships)[2]; and yet others regard it as a functionally insignificant conscious epiphenomenon of the unconscious cognitive processes that really constitute our thinking.[3]

Like percepts, mental images bear intentionality (J.T.E. Richardson, 1980; Harman, 1998; Thomas, 2010 §1.3). That is to say, they are always images (or percepts) of something or other, of some (real or imaginary) "object."[4] (Some philosophers (e.g., Searle, 1992) regard intentionality and consciousness as very closely related phenomena.) However, unlike percepts, images occur in the absence of their object. You cannot perceive a cat when no cat is present, but you can imagine a cat (or any other perceptible thing) at any time. Furthermore, (mistakes aside) you cannot perceive a cat to be other than where and how it actually is, but, whenever you want to, you can imagine (i.e., form an image of) a cat as anywhere, or in any condition. Images thus seem well suited to function as mental representations, allowing us to think of things as they currently are not, and thus to recall the past, plan for the future, fantasize about the unreal, and speculate about the unknown (cf. Addis et al., 2007; Szpunar et al., 2007). Since ancient times, this has generally been believed to be their cognitive function (Thomas, 2010).

Esistono mondi che prendono forma nello spazio mentale, si trasformano in immagini, idee, simboli, pensieri, storie e parole per poi inserirsi nella realtà esterna nella forma di oggetti concreti, nel nostro caso un libro. Il libro viene poi letto, si diffonde insieme alle idee in esso contenute che divengono parte di una cultura, del pensiero di un epoca. A differenza di quel compilatore di grossi libri, descritto da Jorge Luis Borges nella prefazione a Finzioni, il cui faticoso delirio dispiega in cinquecento pagine un concetto la cui perfetta esposizione richiederebbe cinque minuti, lo scrittore argentino ha preferito invece scrivere su “libri immaginari, articoli brevi”. Tra questi è il racconto su cui concentreremo la nostra attenzione seguendo le tracce di un mondo immaginario: Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius .

Michel Foucault's early writing on dreams and imagination is one of the often neglected aspects of his work. In this paper, I give an overview of his "Dreams, Imagination and Existence" essay, accompanied by a discussion of his writings on art and its role as a technique of existence.

This chapter considers a number of issues that arise in connection with a certain sort of imaginative exercise: imagining oneself to be another. Bernard Williams argued that such imaginings give rise to a puzzle: how can I imagine, for example, that I am Napoleon, given that I could not have been Napoleon? The dominant response in the literature to Williams’s puzzle involves saying that when I imagine that I am Napoleon, the content of my imagining is not what it seems to be, namely the proposition that I am Napoleon. I consider various versions of this response, and then take up some further topics concerning imagination’s relation to the self.

Aphantasia is a recently discovered disorder characterised by the total incapacity to generate visual forms of mental imagery. This paper proposes that aphantasia raises important theoretical concerns for the ongoing debate in the philosophy and science of consciousness over the nature of dreams. Recent studies of aphantasia and its neurobehavioral correlates reveal that the majority of aphan-tasics, whilst unable to produce visual imagery while awake, nevertheless retain the capacity to experience rich visual dreams. This finding constitutes a novel explanandum for theories of dreaming. Specifically, I argue that the recent dream reports of aphantasics constitute an empirical challenge to the emerging family of views which claim that dreams are essentially imaginative experiences, constitu-tively involving the kinds of mental imagery which aphantasics, ex-hypothesi, lack. After presenting this challenge in the context of Jonathan Ichikawa's recent arguments for this view, I argue that this empirical challenge may be overcome if the imagination theorist abandons Ichikawa's account of dreaming in favour of a modified version. This involves the claim that dreams are essentially inactive and constitutively involve non voluntary forms of imagination. I conclude with a suggestion for further research which can test the viability of this alternative hypothesis , and move the debate forward.

In this contribution I outline some ideas on what the pragmatist model of habit ontology could offer us as regards the appreciation of the constitutive role that imagery plays for social action and cognition. Accordingly, a Deweyan understanding of habit would allow for an understanding of imagery in terms of embodied cognition rather than in representational terms. I first underline the motor character of imagery, and the role its embodiment in habit plays for the anticipation of action. Secondly, I reconstruct Dewey's notion of imaginative rehearsal in light of contemporary, competing models of intersubjectivity such as embodied simulation theory and the narrative practice hypothesis, and argue that the Deweyan model offers us a more encompassing framework which can be useful for reconciling these approaches. In this text I am mainly concerned with sketching a broad picture of the lines along which such a project could be developed. For this reason not all questions are given equal attention, and I shall concentrate mainly on the basic ideas, without going directly into the details of many of them.

Understanding visually presented stories requires intense effort from our visual imagination. Artists and theoreticians from the Renaissance onwards suggested various ways to depict stories, either to enhance their understanding and enjoyment, or to help adjust the depictions to the aesthetic ideas of the era. Alberti's concept of istoria, Leonardo's practice of visual stimulation, Lessing's advice on how to choose the most fruitful moment of a story relied both on personal experience and the scientific knowledge of the era. Visual imagination is specially needed in non-figurative and sequential narratives in modern and contemporary art, which are supported by Arnheim's notion of stroboscopic motion. Recent developments in image-making technologies enable some clarification of the processes involved in human perception with regard to the understanding of painted scenes and visually presented stories. The objective of this paper is to find the counterparts of these art theoretical concepts in psychology and neuroscience. Through the phenomena of mirror neurons, scene perception, gist of scene, and face and object recognition, these findings establish parallelisms between art history and neuroscience.

For a long time, one of my dreams was to describe the nature of uncertainty axiomatically, and it looks like I've finally done it in my co∼eventum mechanics! Now it remains for me to explain to everyone the co∼eventum mechanics in the most approachable way. This is what I'm trying to do in this work. The co∼eventum mechanics is another name for the co∼event theory, i.e., for the theory of experience and chance which I axiomatized in 2016 [1, 2]. In my opinion, this name best reflects the co∼event-based idea of the new dual theory of uncertainty, which combines the probability theory as a theory of chance, with its dual half, the believability theory as a theory of experience. In addition, I like this new name indicates a direct connection between the co∼event theory and quantum mechanics, which is intended for the physical explanation and description of the conict between quantum observers and quantum observations [4]. Since my theory of uncertainty satises the Kolmogorov axioms of probability theory, to explain this co∼eventum mechanics I will use a way analogous to the already tested one, which explains the theory of probability as a theory of chance describing the results of a random experiment. The simplest example of a random experiment in probability theory is the " tossing a coin ". Therefore, I decided to use this the simplest random experiment itself, as well as the two its analogies: the " "flipping a coin " and the " spinning a coin " to explain the co∼eventum mechanics, which describes the results of a combined experienced random experiment. I would like to resort to the usual for the probability theory " coin-based " analogy to explain (and first of all for myself) the logic of the co∼eventum mechanics as a logic of experience and chance. Of course, this analogy one may seem strange if not crazy. But I did not come up with a better way of tying the explanations of the logic of the co∼eventum mechanics to the coin-based explanations that are commonly used in probability theory to explain at least for myself the logic of the chance through a simple visual " coin-based " model that clarifies what occurs as a result of a combined experienced random experiment in which the experience of observer faces the chance of observation. I hope this analogy can be useful not only for me in understanding the co∼eventum mechanics.

The following essay sketches varieties of imagination operative in the best architectural work. It was published in Warehouse Journal, a student-edited journal produced annually by the Faculty of Architecture, University of Manitoba. Student editors for Warehouse 25 were, Alena Rieger and Ally Pereira-Edwards.

Our successful engagement with the world is plausibly underwritten by our sensitivity to affordances in our immediate environment. The considerable literature on affordances focuses almost exclusively on affordances for bodily actions such as gripping, walking or eating. I propose that we are also sensitive to affordances for mental actions such as attending, imagining and counting. My case for this ‘Mental Affordance Hypothesis’ is motivated by a series of examples in which our sensitivity to mental affordances mirrors our sensitivity to bodily affordances. Specifically, subjects perceive opportunities to perform a mental action and their doing so leads, under the right conditions, to the automatic preparation of that action. I conclude by sketching a mental affordance research program that would reinforce my case for the Mental Affordance Hypothesis and establish its ramifications for a number of debates across philosophy and psychology.

The juxtaposition of style or historical epochs (Gothic against Greek, past
against present) is a common attribute of nineteenth century architectural
criticism. While Pugin's Contrasts; Or, A Parallel Between the Noble Edifices Of
The Fourteenth And Fifteenth Centuries, And Similar Buildings of the Present
Day (1836) provides an explicit example of this methodology a similar reliance
on stylistic and/or temporal binaries is also evident in the later writings of John
Ruskin and Oscar Wilde. The aim of this paper is to compare Pugin's Contrasts
with those of Ruskin and Wilde. Initially adhering to the romantic proposition
that all objects are dependent on the development of an ‘opposite’ for their
representation and being, the treatment of this ‘other’ by each critic reveals
divergent stylistic motives ranging from the hierarchical (asserting the authority
of one by the denigration of the other), appropriation (where opposites combine
to generate a third and superior category) and analogical (the simultaneous
acknowledgement and autonomy of similarity and difference). Acknowledging a
third conceptualisation of the ‘other’ (analogy) that fails to conform with
postcolonial models of appropriation and denigration, the paper will also
demonstrate the methodological importance of ‘difference,’ and the varying
tolerances to it, within internal critiques of English architectural practice
throughout the nineteenth century..

Acting methodologies have long been divided into two simplistic streams: “outside-in” and “inside-out.” These reductionist models fail to account for the range and synergistic nature of the elements integral to an actor’s work. Exploring these elements I discovered a personal tendency toward favouring an intellect removed from its source in breath, body, and imagination, and disengaged from sensation and emotion. Undertaking an exploration of deep embodiment through the practices of Syntonics©, Linklater voice work, Middendorf Breathexperience, and Batdorf Technique, and applied in Theatre@York’s production Oh What a Lovely War! I discovered a rich new source of information arising not from intellect, but from an intelligent, unified, physical being, or body-mind. This experience has revealed a new understanding of how to approach acting, in which every element becomes a potential entry point into a holistically integrated, reciprocal system, and in which visceral, sensate awareness births true presence and performance.

Quantum mechanics have always shown great predictive successes, but also some weird aspects concerning the mathematics-reality correspondence, such as superposition of contradictory events, like a dead and alive cat. Although physicists claim that we have to live with these contradictions, a psycho-biological analysis could propose another explanation. Observation of extra-mental reality is based on direct physical contact between an object, its corresponding sense organ and its mental representation in the brain. In contrast, prediction of the future is no longer directly linked to extra-mental reality, but projects possible observations from the memory of the past into the future. Due to the uncertainty of the future, predictions require mental potentiality, meaning that it may or may not happen in extra-mental reality. Nevertheless, if past observations are regular as in classical physics, they allow predictions with high reliability, whereas if they are irregular as in quantum physics, they are limited to uncertainty and probability. Superposition in classical physics increases space or time units accordingly, whereas quantum superposition considers multiple space locations for the same object at the same time. Thus, the quantum mechanical formalism is in direct contradiction to the philosophical law of non- contradiction, which does not allow considering it as extra-mental reality. However, it has all characteristics of mental potentiality, which allows prediction of future outcomes with probability. The consideration of quantum mechanics as mental potentiality would solve the superposition problem, as well as the measurement and the non-locality problem. According to the regularity or irregularity of observation, classical or quantum mechanical formalism has to be applied for prediction of future dynamics. There is no collapse or continuation of superposition in the wave function, but simply the replacement of an uncertain prediction model by the more certain observation. With this interpretation some weird aspects could be completely eliminated.

[AMAZON LINK BELOW TO BOOK ITSELF -- TOC and book intro in downloadable .pdf] 
Once thought pure entertainment akin to magic acts, hypnosis is now a growing field being practiced by psychologists, psychiatrists, and medical doctors. Across all ages—from children to adults and the elderly—patients are finding professional, therapeutic hypnosis can help them recover from mental maladies ranging from addiction to depression and psychosis, and from physical illnesses from chronic pain to obesity and skin disorders. Studies show hypnosis can even speed healing from broken bones, burns, and surgery. These unprecedented volumes, including some of the best-known experts in the field hailing from Harvard, Stanford and other top universities, cover the newest research and practice in this intriguing arena. Edited by a psychologist at Harvard Medical School, this set explains developments in hypnosis, from its colorful if misguided inception with Anton Mesmer, across clinical techniques developed for health care in the 20th century, to emerging research showing new potential applications to aide mental and physical health. Chapters also highlight what psychologists, neurologists, physicians, and scientists have discovered about how personality, cognition, and brain functions affect, and are affected by, hypnosis. An appendix explains how to tell the difference between an entertainer or charlatan and a practitioner who is trained, credentialed, and practicing research-backed hypnosis. Universities with hypnotherapy programs and courses are also included.

This volume presents Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) research comparing research participants' Inner Guide experiences with Jung's encounters with Philemon, his inner guide. To compare participant experiences with Jung's imaginal engagements, I reviewed Jung's experiments in confrontation with the unconscious in Memories Dreams, Reflections, and The Red Book (i.e., Liber Novus). Research questions asked (1) "What themes and patterns emerge in student descriptions of their inner guide imagery?" and (2) "how do participant accounts relate to Jung's imaginal engagement with personified archetypes?"

This paper looks at the history of our understanding of the imagination and in particular its relation to reason. Once again this is a paper that was published a long time back in 1992 in The Secondary Teacher, a now defunct magazine on education matters and other issues of relevance to teachers.